Nearly half of the departments in Whitehall should be shut to save billions of
pounds and avoid cuts to frontline services, a Tory MP has said.

Dominic Raab MP suggested that the numbers of departments should be cut from 20 to 11, which if combined with a one per cent public sector pay cap would save £10billion a year.

Under Mr Raab’s plan the Home Office and Ministry of Justice would be merged into one department, reversing a split which happened under Gordon Brown in 2007.

Similarly the Foreign Office and Department for International Development, as well as the departments for Energy and Climate Change, and Environment, Fisheries and Rural Affairs would be merged.

Theculture and transport departments would be combined, as well as the Communities and Local Goverment and the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish offices.

Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Mr Raab said: “Britain doesn’t need such a bloated bureaucracy. By slashing the number of government departments – from 20 to 11 - we could cut a huge amount of waste without sacrificing front line services.

“We need an overhaul of Whitehall. The UK has twenty separate government departments. That is high by international standards: the US has 15, Japan 12, Germany 14, while even high-spending Sweden only has twelve.

“As well as inflating public spending, the proliferation of departments encourages mandarins to amass self-serving fiefdoms, fuels excessive regulation, and hampers a joined-up approach to policy-making in cross-cutting areas.”

Mr Raab added that “some departments, like DCMS - which also includes the pointless Government Equalities Office - and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), don’t merit separate bureaucracies with all their associated costs, churning out red-tape.

“In other areas, the proliferation of Whitehall silos hampers coordinated policy making. Too often, for example, the Department for International Development has operated a shadow foreign policy – it should be put back under the wing of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

“Likewise, do we really need two departments for the environment? In practice, it dislocates energy and de-carbonisation policy from vital task of strengthening UK environmental resilience, such as flood and coastal defences.”

The news came as a Government-commissioned report said the Prime Minister should be given the power to appoint the most senior civil servants who run Whitehall departments, a Government-commissioned report recommended.

The IPPR think-tank said Cabinet ministers should also be able to appoint an “extended office” of staff who work directly for them comprising political advisers and non-partisan outside experts as well as career civil servants.

The proposals are intended to make officials more accountable and responsive to ministers without undermining the fundamental commitment to a non-partisan, merit-based Civil Service.

They are likely, nevertheless, to prove highly contentious and provoke fresh accusations that ministers are trying to politicise Whitehall.

The recruitment process for permanent secretaries would still be overseen by the independent Civil Service Commission which would be responsible for drawing up a short list of suitable candidates.

However the final selection would be made by the Prime Minister who, the report argues, is the person best placed to pick the key personnel who are needed to ensure the successful delivery of his political programme.

The successful candidates would be given fixed-term four-year contracts which would be renewable depending on performance.

Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, who commissioned the report, welcomed the proposals, describing them as “evolutionary” and saying they went “with the grain of our Westminster system”.